Earmageddon: JD & The Straight Shot, "Ballyhoo!"

I visited Nashville earlier this year, returning to the city after many years away to pay a long-overdue visit to Eternal Jefitoblog Pal Fred Wilhelm. During that visit, Fred took us to Robert's Western World, which advertises itself as the "go-to honky-tonk" on the city's strip; being a tourist, I can't confirm the veracity of this claim, but I can tell you that while we were there, we heard some incredible trad country, performed by a small, ferociously talented combo whose members all seemed equally adept at handling lead vocals, harmonies, or any of the several instruments each of them picked up at various points throughout the set. Aside from being wildly entertaining, the show served as a reminder of the fact that you can't go anywhere in Nashville without seeing amazing musicians wherever you look — and that remarkable skill and/or dedication is never any guarantee that you'll become a star, or even be able to pay your bills with your art.

I thought about that trip a lot while listening to JD & The Straight Shot's fifth album, 2016's Ballyhoo!, which was inflicted on my inbox and my ears by inside-out water balloon Dave Lifton. If you already know about this band, then I'm very sorry in advance; for the rest of you, it's worth pointing out real quick that this outfit is the distressingly long-lasting musical vanity project led/funded by Cablevision CEO James L. Dolan, whose status as executive chairman of Madison Square Garden has allowed him to insert himself as the opening act for a long list of acts that includes ZZ Top, Keith Urban, the Allman Brothers Band, and the Eagles. As a singer, Dolan makes Bruce Willis sound like Mike Patton; as a guitarist, the best that can be said is that he lacks any shred of self-awareness and apparently has excellent taste in absurdly expensive axes.

But as with any self-respecting vanity project, it really isn't the person signing checks who matters the most — it's whether or not their upsetting wealth has been put to good use in terms of finding talented people who are tired and/or financially unstable enough to take the money and help them drag the corpse across the finish line. Based on Ballyhoo! — which threateningly bills itself as "100% Acoustic" and is, I promise you, the only JD & The Straight Shot album I will ever listen to — I think I can confidently say that whatever his numerous and/or revolting character defects might be, he appears to have at least some talent for targeting musicians who would be far too well off to take his calls in a just world. Perhaps as a favor to the people who played on it, Ballyoo! doesn't seem to include any credits, but my (sigh) research tells me that bassist Byron House is a regular Straight Shotter, which is a little like Pino Palladino being forced to supplement his income by touring and recording with Scott Baio.